Talk:Gnar/@comment-24704296-20140828215657/@comment-6281696-20140829092941
And then your opponent dives... Gnar currently needs some weird hybrid of agressive and passive play to ensure that his opponent is low enough to not risk diving while he himself doesn't get pushed too low either. It also makes his build extremely awkward as he kind of wants everything, unlike say renekton who can quite happily start out with a hydra and not massivly suffer from the lack of defenses or start with sunfire and still have reasonable offense due to his base stats actually being half decent. Also, his early game CD's are just outright ridiculous, there are plenty of times where I'd like to level W first, or E if I get ganked a lot, but due to the insane CD on your boomerang you have no choice but to level that one first if you want to actually be able to do stuff in a fight (in mini at least) and even his other CD's are rather massive and decrease quite a lot by leveling. Also counterplay against him is a bit too easy and obvious, there are plenty of lanes where early on he's only a threat in mega, which just means they'l hang back for one wave and then continue to bully you when you're not a threat. As for using R to trade, if you can smash him into a wall you might as well commit, your full combo hurts most opponents plenty and the stuns give you a fairly significant frame in which you can just attack freely. Really you should now be able to kill your opponent. And if you simply let them get away you'l only get safety for say 30 seconds at most, less in some occasions, which really isn't worth it. Other than that, yea mostly you'l be forced to hang back and farm a lot with your boomerang, so far I've only seen a handfull of opponents with whom I could trade well and those all were opponents that allowed me to proc his W at least once, and didn't have the burst too be scary (yet). Pretty much anything with some form of ranged attack can harras better than him since most can avoid his W fairly reliably due to his limited range, AS & massive CD's early on and without a proc from his W his damage in mini is fairly unimpressive. Also anything with high burst due to his awefull base stats since you simply can't take that if you're in mini (some of the higher burst champions can outright kill him in one combo early on). Brutaliser works, though personally I prefer Botrk since his sustain is just so awefull and at some point you will get hit regardless of how defensive you play (depending on the lane I stay at cutlass for quite some time while first finishing some defenses). Also Zephyr is quite good as a second damage item, plus it gives some much needed tenacity if you don't have mercury threads.